At Izakayas, Japanese Food Gets Informal

The izakaya approach to drinking and dining is alive in New York at spots like Yopparai on the Lower East Side.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

By JULIA MOSKIN

April 9, 2013

Now that sushi is sold in supermarkets and ramen has come to food courts, what next?

Easy: izakayas. These informal Japanese restaurants have been opening at a rapid pace around the country, but most Americans haven’t figured them out yet. Where’s the sushi bar? What’s with the tiny portions? Is this Asian fusion tapas or what?

That’s the izakaya: easy to love, but hard to nail down. It’s friendlier than a French bar à vins, has more food choices than a Spanish tapeo, and takes itself less seriously than a British gastro pub.

But it makes the same point: drinking is primary; food is secondary; and if you’re doing it right, there will be hangovers.

“Hangover prevention is a big topic of conversation at izakaya meals,” said Yukari Sakamoto, a Japanese-American sommelier and writer who lives in Tokyo. (She swears by a morning-after remedy called Ukon no Chikara.) “That is, when you’re not talking about what to eat next.”

From the words for sake (rice wine) and stay, traditional izakayas are places anyone can linger for the price of a drink. The word is usually translated as tavern or pub — not very helpfully, since those words suggest a menu more T.G.I. Friday’s than Nobu. An izakaya isn’t a destination for great ramen, or perfect tempura, or impeccable sushi — although the menu, confusingly, will list all those dishes and more. Izakaya food, like most bar food, is salty and spicy, crunchy and savory, and engineered to be especially delicious with beer or wine.

Blue Ribbon Izakaya and Sushi on the Lower East Side puts its own spin on familiar dishes like chopped liver.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

At their best, izakaya meals can also be models of Japanese culinary poise and delicacy. “It’s supposed to be a kind of casual place to eat and drink,” said Eric Bromberg, the chef and restaurateur who opened Blue Ribbon Izakaya and Sushi on the Lower East Side last year. “But since it’s Japan, everything comes out beautiful and elegant anyway.”

In this country, izakaya tradition is alive and well at places like Yopparai, Ten and Bozu in New York City, Roku, Chotto and Yuzuki in San Francisco and Raku in Las Vegas. At Sakamai on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Toranoko in Los Angeles, Miso in Atlanta and Kushi in Washington, Japanese-trained chefs are reinterpreting the tradition.

And a few chefs who don’t normally cook Japanese food at all have gone into izakaya mode, happy to discover a corner of that nation’s gastronomy that is relatively loose and open to interpretation by outsiders.

The result is a new intersection of the Japanese canon and American bar food, in dishes like the chef David Myers’s baked potato at Hinoki and the Bird in Los Angeles, a roasted sweet potato topped with crème fraîche spiked with pickled plum, chopped red chilies, chives and bacon. Mr. Bromberg’s creamy horseradish-cucumber salad, like his mirin-spiked chopped liver served with an entire loaf of challah toast, has a playful Japanese-Jewish quality. And at Chez Sardine in Greenwich Village, the maple-miso salmon head for two skillfully evokes both the chef Mehdi Brunet-Benkrikly’s Canadian roots and the classic fatty, smoky izakaya dish of buri kama, grilled yellowtail collar.

“I would be paralyzed by the idea of opening a sushi bar,” said Gabe Stulman, the restaurant’s Wisconsin-bred owner. “But an izakaya was easy for me to wrap my head around.”

In Japan, where the custom goes back at least to the 19th century, izakayas — marked by glowing red lanterns and long sake lists — are where co-workers go to celebrate a promotion, where young people meet to fill up before clubbing or karaoke, where families gather for an inexpensive weekend treat. There are upscale and hole-in-the-wall izakayas, kawaii izakayas where the waitresses are dressed as little girls, and chains of kechi yasui (“for misers”) izakayas where the drinks or food come free. Among young people, sake consumption has been steadily declining in Japan as stronger drinks become popular, and chain izakayas are among the efforts by the sake industry to bring them back.

“In Japanese life, there is a lot of drinking, but it is always combined with eating,” said Ms. Sakamoto, who was raised in Minnesota and attended culinary school in New York City, and was a sommelier at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo. “Which is why we have more izakayas than bars.”

Hagi, an izakaya in Midtown.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

Many eating places in Japan are small, dedicated to just one dish (grilled chicken or tempura, not both) and organized to get you in and out as quickly as possible. Many others are the opposite: hushed, slow-paced and exclusive ryotei; or rooms dedicated to kaiseki, the stately procession of bites that accompanies a tea ceremony.

So any restaurant where the atmosphere is chatty, or raucous, or could be described as “hopping,” is very likely an izakaya. You might be eating a careful composition of persimmon and endive at Maru in Shibuya, the heart of Tokyo; or a homey plate of goya chanpuru, a sauté of bitter melon, eggs and Spam on Okinawa (or, for that matter, the grilled, bacon-wrapped mochi rice balls at Roku in San Francisco), but all izakaya food is drink-friendly and meant to be shared.

“This is what the young people like,” said Tatsuya Kawamoto, the general manager of Hagi, a popular izakaya in Midtown Manhattan, gesturing around the shabby but perpetually packed room. Almost every table held a golden pile of fried lotus or burdock root, served with a spicy mayonnaise spiked with fish roe, and an okonomiyaki, a savory pancake topped with sliced pork and feathery flakes of dried bonito.

Although the menu may look huge and rambling, there is a logical sequence to an izakaya meal.

“To a Japanese eye, an izakaya menu looks like a bento box,” Ms. Sakamoto said. “And you just know how to eat it: something raw, something pickled, something fried, something simmered.” At some izakayas, the menu is helpfully organized into those categories, but most are sink or swim. It pays to be persistent and ask your server’s advice.

Always, she said, the meal begins with a round of cold beer and hot edamame, before the arrival of bottles of sake, or of shochu, an increasingly popular distilled spirit made from rice, sweet potatoes, barley or sugar cane. Shochu cocktails called chu-hai are youth favorites at izakayas, sometimes infused with fresh litchi or yuzu, or in cheaper spots confected from neon-colored green apple or grape syrup — or even spiked with Calpico, the yogurt-flavored drink that is popular all over Japan.

At upscale izakayas, many patrons drink honkaku shochu, which is single-distilled and retains some residual character and aroma of the original plant. On the rocks, straight shochu goes well with izakaya food, with the rasp of vodka but smoother and about half as intoxicating.

The initial round of drinks is followed by raw vegetables or fish, like octopus marinated in wasabi (one of the best in Manhattan is at Ten, in Chelsea), or shiokara, inky preserved squid, which even in Japan is considered a chinmi or “rare bite.” (Yopparai, on the Lower East Side, has a whole list of them.) And so on through kushiyaki (grilled skewers), nabemono (stews) and finally, some form of rice or noodles, to soak up the shots you’ve drunk through all the courses. This may or may not be sushi; in Japan, izakayas stock only a small selection, but it is invariably seasonal and fresh.

Cucumbers with miso at Hagi.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

A customary end to an izakaya meal is ochazuke, a mound of rice with tea or dashi poured over it (a bit like cereal with milk), topped with a morsel of fish and some crisp seaweed. Believed to settle the stomach, it is the last thing to eat before staggering out into the night. A lovely version is served at Momokawa in Murray Hill, and at Yopparai.

Getting thoroughly drunk at izakayas is expected, and even encouraged. “There are not many areas of Japanese life where it’s O.K. to be sloppy, or not present your best face,” Mr. Bromberg said. “Izakayas are like a necessary escape.”

It’s not only the customers who are allowed to cut loose in izakayas; it’s also the chef. In traditional Japanese gastronomy, there is not much room for individual choice: an herb might be changed, a new ramen topping invented, but most things are made at a certain time of year, in a certain shape and with a certain gravity.

An innovation like the “sushi bomb” served at Bozu, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — dainty bites of sushi the size and shape of a chocolate truffle — would be possible only in an izakaya, never in a serious sushi bar. And many izakaya kitchens are laboratories for weird and wonderful hybrids of Japanese food and global ingredients: versions of jalapeño poppers, kimchi, fried rice and pasta carbonara share space with more-traditional Japanese bar food like skate wings and morokyu, fresh cucumbers with miso for dipping.

Culinary cross-pollination is also popular in this country, in dishes like Kushi’s peel-and-eat shrimp (with shichimi, a Japanese chile powder, standing in for Old Bay), and the fried chicken ramen at Noodlecat in Cleveland.

Mr. Myers of Hinoki and the Bird, who travels to Japan several times a year, said that a good izakaya — no matter how experimental — always uses ingredients that reflect its terroir, the season and the Japanese ideal of freshness.

“I would be wary of an izakaya that serves pasta carbonara,” he said. “Creativity is fine, but quality has to come first.”

Correction: April 17, 2013

An article last Wednesday about Japanese restaurants known as izakayas misstated the name of a yogurt-flavored drink popular in Japan. It is Calpico, not Capilco.